Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has clock speeds of 1469 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 31744 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (approximately 253%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 151536 (253%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (more or less 96%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23008 (96%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.